A critical challenge for the next century will be transitioning towards food systems that conserve biodiversity, sustain life-support systems, and safeguard rural livelihoods. Worldwide, however, intensive monocultures are replacing natural areas and the diversified farms that traditionally cultivated multiple crops and maintained native vegetation.

In this talk, Daniel Karp quantifies the economic benefits that conserving biodiversity could yield to Costa Rican farmers. He assesses how farmers could shift their agricultural practices to simultaneously increase biodiversity and their own profits.

Maintaining forest in farmland would benefit species of traditional conservation value and would likely increase pest control. These results suggest that conserving rainforest in farmland, or diversifying farms more broadly, represents a promising win-win opportunity for biodiversity and farmers.

Daniel Karp is a postdoctoral NatureNet fellow based at the University of California, Berkeley and the Nature Conservancy. Daniel completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Stanford University’s Department of Biology. His research interests center on developing innovative methods for harmonizing food production with the conservation of ecosystem services and biodiversity.